The essence of the Quantified Self movement is to get knowledge about your mind and body using data.

You can do this by manually checking and recording everything you do. Track your vitals, your food, your workouts, your productivity, and your moods. But the manual approach is tiring. What if you just want to get started, without making too much of an effort?

Thanks to smartphones with sensors, apps, and wearables, you can start putting numbers on significant parts of your life without manual tracking.

Numbers and Estimates Are Better Than Nothing

When you use consumer technology and apps to track your life, what you’re getting are estimates. The apps, wearablesThe 7 Best Fitness TrackersThe 7 Best Fitness TrackersIf you’re an active person, activity trackers provide incredibly valuable data for logging, improving, and understanding your fitness. But among the devices out there, finding the right activity tracker can be difficult.Read More, and services listed here give you the best estimates possible.

Knowing something is much better than knowing nothing.

While you shouldn’t rely on them blindingly, they do serve as a good compass. Looking at the data and how one thing in your life influences another is certainly going to be insightful. You’ll be able to see how eating something hits your sleep. Some of this is obvious, sure. But it’s one of those things where your brain can’t really register it until you see it.

It’s these insights that will motivate you to achieve your goals, be healthier or just be more mindful about your time in general. Whether you want to lose weight, gain muscle, eat better, or just want to live a healthy lifestyle.

Next-Level Passive Tracking

After you’ve got a rough idea of how much it is that you move about in an average day, it’s time to start tracking more things about your life. The places you visit, how much did you walk or ran or biked.

Moves app does all this automatically. It’s available on both iOS and Android. It runs in the background and it uses GPS to track your movement. It then tags parts of your day as walking, cycling or transportation using its algorithms. And it mostly gets things right (when it doesn’t, you can go in and edit the details).

Moves is a good way to get a timeline view of your life without taking the time out to write everything. Moves isn’t without issues. Sometimes it can be a battery hog (I’m using the iPhone 6s Plus so it doesn’t bother me that much) and sometimes it just gets things wrong or jumbles up locations when they’re too close to each other.

Privacy is, of course, a big issue for Moves. A while back, the app was purchased by Facebook and that might be reason enough not to use the app. But thankfully, Moves doesn’t sync or backup any of your data until you create an account. Without which, all your data will be stored locally on your device.

Even with that concern, I would recommend you start using Moves. It provides valuable insight into your life and it integrates well with the health dashboard apps we’ll talk about below.

Download — Moves for (Free) | Android (Free)

Track Your Workouts Using Your Smartphone

When you’re trying to be healthy, you try and do two things — watch what you eat and workout. Tracking workouts is much easier than tracking everything you eat.

For tracking your runs and bike rides, I would recommend using Strava. The app is free, has an excellent user experience, simple UI and a big helpful community of fellow runners and bikers. Plus, Strava integrates with Health app on iOS, Google Fit on Android and a lot of other health dashboard services.

An eye on my heart rate during workouts is also helpful. I know when I’m slacking off or overdoing it. If you have an iPhone, want to get into shape, and don’t mind spending $300 on a wearable, I would highly recommend the Apple Watch as a fitness tracker.

But that’s not the only option around. Fitbit’s new Charge 2 for $150 (£130) also comes with a heart rate sensor and workout tracking, along with stellar automatic sleep tracking function.

You can also dip your toes in the pool by getting the cheaper Fitbit Flex 2 (UK) or the $15 Xiaomi Mi Band 2 which comes with a heart rate sensor (although my experience with its sleep tracking hasn’t been the best).

If you’re tracking how much you move about in a day, and the calories you’re burning, you might want to track your sleep as well (because there might be a direct relationship there). Get the knowledge and then try to optimize it.

You can use mobile apps like Sleep Cycle (for both iOS and Android). Connect your phone to the charger, and put it on your bed and it will track your deep and light sleep cycles. The app will even try and wake you up at just the right time (when you’re in light sleep mode).

For people who prominently work on a Mac or a Windows machine, RescueTime takes care of that. Install the app and it will track how you spend your time on your machine. It will automatically sort out activities in categories and will tell you how much of the time spent was productive.

RescueTime knows which apps and websites are productive and which aren’t. But you can always go in and edit the details. RescueTime’s free plan is enough for most users but you can upgrade to the premium plan for $9/month to get additional features like a focused mode, unlimited report history and more detailed reports and filters.

Watching what you eat, tracking your calories and making sure you don’t eat way more than what you’re burning off is the most important part if you’re trying to lose weight. If you’re in the US and your diet has food that is easily trackable, use the MyFitnessPal app.

Once integrated with the Health app or Google Fit, MyFitnessPal becomes a dashboard for your calories. You’ll be able to see how many calories you consumed and burned off today.

It will let you scan barcodes for things you buy off the shelf and the app makes it easy to track repeat diets (so that down the line, it doesn’t take up that much time).

MyFitnessPal also integrates with Health app and Google Fit. So, you can see the calories you’ve burned and consumed in a day, in a single page (and that can make you more aware).

You can use Google Fit to record your weight as well. Health app, Fitbit, and Google Fit will let you track your weight loss/gain journey visually using graphs. MyFitnessPal also has a feature to quickly record your weight.

Turn All That Data Into a Dashboard

But to get an overview, you need all your data in one centralized place, or else it’s just “Quantified Parts of Self”.

The Health app and Google Fit app do this to a certain extent. But the winner for me is the Gyroscope app for iPhone (it also has a web component you can use until the Android app comes out).

Once you’ve signed up for free and have connected the Health app, Strava, Moves, Fitbit and RescueTime, Gyroscope is now the only app you need to open at the end of the day to see how your day went.

Gyroscope is a beautifully designed app that generates some amazing looking visuals of your life. You can then export them as images and share them on social media platforms. Gyroscope’s free plan is good enough for beginners. To track more things like sleep analysis, food and water tracking, yearly reports, more layouts and to sync your entire Health app history, you can pay $7.99/month.

Exist.io is a similar service. It’s web-based but also has iOS and Android apps. While Gyroscope is about having a single dashboard to view details for your life, Exist is more about analyzing your data to give you insights. Sometimes those insights are useful, sometimes they’re just plain dumb. But with Exist, there’s no free plan.

Just Track Your Habits Manually

One of the few things I track manually is my habits and goals. Using an app like Productive on iOS and HabitHub on Android, you can check in every time you do something. For me, I’m trying to either walk or go to the gym every day. The only way I’m going to be accountable for it is if I track it.

Khamosh Pathak is a freelance technology writer and User Experience Designer. When he's not helping people make the best of their current technology, he's helping clients design better apps and websites. In his free time, you'll find him watching comedy specials on Netflix and trying once again, to get through a long book. He is @pixeldetective on Twitter.